Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can’t easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem. The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don’t know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?

    • FlickOfTheBean@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Defederated FB marketplace, eh? Community centric geoservers might not actually be a bad idea… But the moderation and security of users is still a massive road lock for a system like that. I wouldn’t trust it at first, personally… Not sure how to get around that.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        I am desperate for location-based internet. My local government can’t be bothered to supply any information online beyond what they are required to. Craigslist and facebook marketplace provide at least commerce, sorta. And of course universities nowadays have official discord servers. See how our need to localize has ended up supporting the most evil corporations rather than self-hosting? I was very interested in Youtube Location-based videos, but it’s a mystery how it works and hidden behind The Algorithm, rather than a local videos page.